by Madeleine Kando(This essay came about as an email exchange between Tom and myself)
Madeleine: As I was listening to a program about the draw-down of troops in Iraq, I realized that most of the time I am not aware that this country is at war. War, to me, means bombed out cities, people trying to survive by hiding in the subway. People being shot at for no reason, just because they are 'in the way'. But we fight our wars somewhere else, so that our streets are safe, our food is on the table, our babies don't get trampled by marching soldiers.
Tom:
What America is doing now is actually what the British General Montgomery once said, "We British fight our wars overseas; we prefer it that way." Americans now say, "If we don’t fight them there, we'll have to fight them here." They say this because they were traumatized by 9/11, and the right-wing elite won't ever let them forget it. But I think Americans are stupid. By "fighting them over there," they are paying much more than it's worth. They are going broke, losing thousands of men, and they are not winning the wars over there anyway.
Madeleine:
It is a terrible thing to be part of a war where the enemy is invisible. Where is our enemy? Yes, I know, we are fighting 'the terrorists', the 'bad guys', the guys that are threatening our way of life. But my life does not feel threatened. I can drive to the pool, I can think about what I should make for dinner. I can go to the movies. What is it that I can NOT do because of this war? At least the German soldiers marching into Paris were visible to the Parisians. They could feel and touch them. They could hate them. They were 'the enemy'.
Tom:
Yes, things are very different from World War Two. There is no standing enemy. But you seem to be ambivalent. Like me, you probably feel that we should get out of there a.s.a.p., but you must also agree that the Taliban, Al-Qaida and radical Islam are bad (think just how they deal with women - for starters).
I feel that we should get the hell out of both Afghanistan and Iraq immediately. We should - as a result - become an economically much stronger country, and be better prepared in case of future confrontations with radical Islam (or with anyone else). We should totally condemn, reject and do everything we can against radical Islam (but not organized, wasteful standing warfare, which only leads to failure). We should stop nation-building in places which will not be functioning nations for thousand years, no matter what (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Iraq, Sudan, most of the Middle East). In other words, do pretty much what Bill Clinton did.
Madeleine:
I understand why Europe has an advantage. Why they created the European Union. As an attempt to bind nations so that the horror of the two World Wars would never be repeated.
Tom:
Of course unification was the right thing to do after World Wars I and II, but who knows what Europe will be like in the future. Unification is not preventing it from being overrun by Muslim immigrants, and it isn't clear who will reach Third World status first - the US or Europe. We are all sinking. Most likely PARTS of both - the US Gulf region is already a catastrophe, and so are various Mediterranean regions...
Madeleine:
Is this country too 'naïve', too 'green', too 'overconfident', to realize that war is never going to benefit us or the nations that we are trying to 'save'?
Tom:
Naïve and overconfident, you say? Of course. I would say it's more than naïve and overconfident. It's tragic and idiotic. It seems that we are bent on digging our own grave, while the rest of the world is laughing all the way to the bank. It's a tragedy all around - for the countries we are trying to "help" AND for us.
So we'd be much better off getting out, and strengthening our defenses closer to home, including fixing our economy.
Meanwhile, the opportunistic Europeans, Chinese and Japanese are reaping all the benefits. America pays the price for (trying to) policing the world and protecting the flow of oil, commerce, etc.
The solution? There isn't one for those countries. Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, the rest of the Middle East, etc., those place will not be viable countries for another 1000 years (and by the way, there is NO solution for the Arab-Israeli conflict either. There will never be peace there, never). But for us here, there IS a solution, and that is to get the heck out of there and start rebuilding a country which used to be great.leave comment here